The semester is almost coming to an end.

Before getting into the assignment that I have been working on, the lab report, I want to mention that I got my grade back for my last assignment and I was pretty pleased with my grade.

I have been working on the lab report project. This project is 10% of my final grade. The first draft was already submitted for peer review. This project has been a roller coaster for me. I have been feeling unmotivated and anxious lately which made it harder for me to work on this project. The topic I chose was based off my last project. I found the MTA subways to be quite interesting especially after finding out about their signaling system.

As someone who has rode the subway nearly everyday since I started college two years ago I had never looked into the subway signaling system. I believe many of the subway riders aren’t even aware as to why their daily commute gets delayed so often. Thus, I decide to do some more research on the topic and make it into a lab report.

There were actually a lot of articles of people calling out the delays of the subway. There was also a lot of articles about the $7billion budget to fix the signals and replace the entire system. Many people argued that it was an outrageous price. After reading some of these articles, I found out that other countries had also modernized their systems at lower prices. Due to the current pandemic, the MTA is in serious problems regarding funding. This means that the modernization of the signals will more likely than not get delayed, the plan was already going to take a few years. There was no current information of what is going on with the project during the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to see if the economic crisis that the MTA is going through would affect their plan to proceed the plan to modernize the signal system, but I guess time will tell.

What I found out to be the Most surprising part of the research was finding out the 1930’s technology being used. THEY LITERALLY HAVE THE SOME OF THE ORIGINAL ARTIFACTS. To me, to think that New York City Subway has such old technology boggles my mind. During my research, I watched this video about the signal system. Their intro was, “it’s not just the architecture that’s old. It’s also the basic technologies”. THAT IS NOT A RELIVING START TO AN OFFICIAL MTA VIDEO. But to be honest, until this project I was one of the New Yorkers that never realized how old the subway technology actually was.